After Dylan Sings Sinatra, Will Eminem Do Gershwin?

February 12, 2015 8:57 PM

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The legendary Bob Dylan has just released an album of Frank Sinatra standards. No one saw that one coming. Included on the record are such well-known songs as “Autumn Leaves,” “Some Enchanted Evening” and “Full Moon and Empty Arms,” which is based on Sergei Rachmaninoff ’s preposterously famous Second Piano Concerto. But there are also lots of somewhat less-famous tunes such as “Stay with Me” and “The Night We Called It a Day.”

Some people say the album is great, others that it’s awful. Some people say Mr. Dylan is just being his usual old, iconoclastic, unpredictable self, keeping American society on its toes. Nobody seems to think that Mr. Dylan’s voice is quite on a par with Sinatra’s. Even the dead Sinatra.

Josh Fruhlinger, the author of the blog The Comics Curmudgeon, specializes in skewering by-the-numbers attempts at humor by people who are paid to provide laughs on a quotidian basis. His specialty is analyzing daily newspaper comic strips, especially old, tired, cliché-ridden, and obsolescent strips. "Archie" is a particular target of his ire. Fruhlinger came up with his own idea about how the present-day practitioners of the old strip about the Riverdale High adolescent and his boring friends come up with their gags. He calls it the Archie Joke-Generating Laugh Unit 3000 (or AJGLU 3000 for short). I think Queenan employs a similar device to try to generate laughs at his easy targets.

Styles change, but it's all music (and Lady Gaga was known for her technical excellence and eclectic taste long before she did her album with Tony Bennett). As the Smithsonian's new Leadbelly collection indicates, the split between folk and midcentury pop was an ideological thing for Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and later Bob Dylan -- a quest (with totalitarian overtones in the case of Guthrie and Seeger) for the pure voice of "the people." Pre-World War II performers were happy to work in all genres as long as audiences wanted to hear them.

A few of these suggestions are not far-fetched. I'd love to hear Eric Clapton cover Django Reinhardt. A great guitar player covering a great guitar player sound good. But, and I'm so glad I finally get to say this, Bob Dylan can't sing and Sinatra could. My wife is a huge Dylan fan (it stopped for me after Nashville Skyline and Blonde on Blonde) and so we sampled his homage to Sinatra. All I can say is it's good for married people to laugh together. I guess when you're Dylan no one will say "no." BTW: I don't like Miley Cyrus but if you look around the web you'll find her singing some traditional country songs and she's actually pretty good. In fact, doing the Woody Guthrie Songbook might redeem the mess of her public life.

Zimmy croons Frankie's schmaltz, disses Merle, Leiber and Stoller, what happened to that rock and roll rebelion? What's next, Van Morrison Does It To Dino, Mick Jagger Celebrates Perry Como? I'd pay money to hear Dylan's covers of Sam the Sham, but this? Danke Schoen, to quote a legendary Las Vegas interpreter of the overrated and mostly forgotten Great American Songbook, who's still waiting for a tribute album from the grunge rockers. I hear the truly legendary 13th Floor Elevators are reuniting, let us hope it is not to revive the works of legendary Lawrence Welk.